Just traveling back by train from LinuxTag, Berlin to Nürnberg. How was LinuxTag? In general it seems to me that LinuxTag may should change their motto “Were .com meets .org” as the event changed over the years more and more to an community project events with a few companies attending and a few business visitors passing by. I wonder who’s willing to pay the bill for LinuxTag ongoing? But that’s not of my business. Apart of the trade show the LinuxTag team served a pretty broad and high quality 4 days conference. For the community guys and girls I’d say it was a pretty good event with much conversation and meeting of people you normally just meet on mailingslists, forums or IRC and with a bunch of poeple new or intersted in Linux and open source.

We had big fun at the openSUSE booth showing mainly the openSUSE Build Service 2.0 and milestone 7 of openSUSE 11.3. Additional of this usual trade show program we served daily 3-4 small hack sessions on the booth to teach people in things like, Roll your first package in the Build Service, Insights into GNOME 3.0 or learning some Inkscape magic.  They all were well attended and gave room for intensive 1:few conversations. The biggest fun we had with “Henne’s handicraft workshop” which took place daily at 5pm at the booth and covered stuff like creating your openSUSE bag, match LinuxNacht dress cody by wearing an openSUSE pin etc.

In the conference I visited a few presentation to get more knowledge about SUSE Studio, Mono, open sourc in companies etc. I visited as well Microsoft’s keynote and I was not alone in the room 😉
The keynote was given by James Utzschneider who’s heading the open source department at Microsoft since less then a year but is with Microsoft for over 15 years. He’s a good talker and it looks to me that he’s a smart guy as well. He was pretty clear on the open source strategy Microsoft is following:

• Microsoft changed heavily. Everything can be put on the table for disussion today but should be backed with good arguments.
• Customer are asking that Microsoft products work seamlessly with open source products where ever they are used at customers location. So, main goal here is to follow common standards and improve the interoperability in literally all areas to make the customers confident and stay with Microsoft products.
• Microsoft is a business company and is mainly driven through business cases – if the open source path is beneficial in $ for Microsoft – Microsoft will take it further down. Its pretty unlikely that things are done for the open source community just to make them happy.

We might get in touch with James as Microsoft could spice up the openSUSE conference in October. Ahh, with regards to that we informed pretty many other projects and developers at LinuxTag about the openSUSE conference and this years motto “Collaboration accross borders” and it was well received and we should be able to cover a number of interesting topics working together with communities other then the openSUSE one. Now it the time to shape the conference, call for papers is open till July 31.

Pavol put up a collection of photos which give a good summary of openSUSE @ LinuxTag 2010. We had fun at LinuxTag 2010, had many good conversations, got new valuable input in many areas and are keen on how LinuxTag evolves in the future.